In the design of processor chips, power consumption has become another important technical index in succession to the processor performance. The design of a low-consumption processor is in great demand and will be widely applied whether in the field of general-purpose processors or embedded processors.
Since the power consumption of a processor is in direct ratio to the clock frequency of the processor, dynamically altering the frequency of a processor according to requirements of the running programs during the running of the processor has become an effective measure for reducing the power consumption of a processor.
Multi-core processors have become an important trend in processor development. In a multi-core processor, each processor core real-timely adjusts the frequency according to its loading and different demands so that it can reduce the power consumption effectively.
In the prior art, one situation is that all the processor cores in a multi-core processors use the same clock and thus all the processor cores must be adjusted together during frequency adjustment. But, in this way, the power consumption of the all processors can be reduced only to a limited extent.
Another situation is that each processor core uses a different clock, so that each processor core may dynamically adjust the frequency according to its condition, thereby better saving the power consumption of the processor. But, because the processor cores adopt different clock frequencies, the data communication between a processor core and another can only be an asynchronous clocks communication, thereby influencing the efficiency of data exchange and communication between the processor cores and degrading the overall performance of the processor.